Over the weekend, I spoke with a former diplomat and World Bank type who had lived in Toronto for 20 years. He was lamenting how American ignorance of other cultures and countries made us so susceptible to anecdote-based lies — in this case, about the Canadian national health care system.

I didn't take notes on that conversation, but this post (h/t Hal Davis) from a Canadian centrist built very nicely on the theme (emphasis mine).

It pains me to see my American cousins being denied affordable and
effective health care. It pains me even more the reasons it is being
denied is a series of grand deceits.

Many conservatives proudly introduce themselves as "fiscal
conservatives" as if to imply they have a monopoly on money matters. If
they are politically inclined their "expertise" extends to public
expenditures. It is mainly conservatives who are telling Americans they
cannot afford universal single payer Medicare when the reverse is true
America cannot afford to not implement such a program. Many governments
learned long ago that the only cost effective way to deliver certain
services, specifically Medicare, to the public was through universal
programs where the cost was spread over the entire population; in other
words a collectivity-or that dreaded word that strikes fear in to the
heart of every American-socialism.

This writer has the benefit of our national Medicare plan, a group
benefit plan through my employer, and government run universal car
insurance. These services become affordable or much more affordable
only because a very large number of people make it so by pooling
resources. A so-called fiscal conservative who denies the cost benefits
and efficiencies of this sort of collectivity denies an immutable truth
and one that is ageless.

The idea the private sector provides goods and services more
efficiently than government is only one of the big lies of our times-
and another of the sins of the revenge conservatives has been to
denigrate the role of government to facilitate their greed.

I've been on a reduced blogging schedule, obviously, and haven't yet broken out in hives. Hard to say whether it will become a reformed habit. Meanwhile, here's a cross-post from the Growth & Justice blog.

His comments — on the respective roles of the free market, financial and industrial sectors and the political system — provide a critique of what happens when national goals are determined by theoretical economics and the free market, without enlightened guidance from the political system.

For example, he says, allowing the free market to set industrial policy — say, reducing national petroleum consumption — doesn't necessarily result in the best asset allocation to benefit society. The question, he says, is how do you re-regulate a financial system so that doing the important, productive work that needs to be done is what's profitable?

Next, a video featuring Chris Ware's character, Quimby the Mouse, via Mark Gisleson. Quimby was a strange, early and often impenetrable Ware creation. Is this about mouse-cat-fish relations or love and co-dependence? You decide.

I can almost hear the clatter of hooves when Craig Westover lectures on economics.

No, not cloven hooves, silly! Just the sound of the carriage sweeping him away to his drawing room, where he can peruse his crumbling, leather-bound volumes of Bastiat, Hazlitt and von Mises, gathering strength before heaving out of his Chesterfield to compose a yet another grumpy missive to Dave Mindeman.

I do not disagree with some of Westover's argument. Such is the curse
of a libertarian-leaning leftist who tries to keep an open mind. For example:

But beyond the essential obligations of government, as spelled out in
its constitution, it is incumbent on government to prove the usefulness
of the services it would propose to supply in exchange for taxpayer
dollars. Apart from the intrinsic utility of government services, no
valid argument can be made in favor of keeping a government employee on
the payroll simply because such benevolence provides the employee a job.

Notice, if you follow the correspondents, Westover is refuting an argument Dave Mindeman does not actually make
in his critique of the governor's approach to balancing the state
budget. Mindeman, in my reading, does not say benevolence requires
preserving government jobs. He simply observes that cutting services to avoid
raising taxes on the wealthy produces more unemployment.

And, if I may add, it takes money out of circulation by people who must spend it so the investor class might place it productively with AIG, Bernie Madoff or collateralized debt obligations.

In response, Westover must haul out his Hazlitt again and run his finger over the well-rubbed lines:

Repetita docent:
The benefits to government workers of collecting a salary is what is
seen. The benefits to the economy that result from their spending is
also what is seen. Mr. Mindeman cannot be accused of ignoring the
obvious. But the great burden weighing on the taxpayer like a sodden
cotton coat is what is not seen. The salary the government worker
spends on himself is money the taxpayer does not have to spend on
himself; the money the government worker spends in support of those who
supply him is money not spent by the taxpayer with people who supply
him.

To illustrate his point, he then lurches through an hilarious parable about a well-to-do family foregoing a $10,000 addition to their home because their taxes were about to spike by a similar amount.

Do the math. A family, let us postulate that they are well-to-do, is
sitting at the kitchen table about to sign a contract with a home
remodeler to build an addition on its home for $10,000. But just before
they sign a newspaper article catches their eyes. It relates how the
state of Minnesota will raise taxes in their bracket by $10,000 a year.
This sobering news makes the prudent family reconsider, and it does not
hire the remodeler to build the addition on its home.

Sobering news, indeed. But to swallow such a concoction, the family must read his newspaper columns to the exclusion of all else. Clearly, Westover must have learned the economics of the remodeling trade from his boss, who operates from a similarly theoretical grasp of taxes and small businesses.

Do the math, says Westover. Oh, I want to, but it is so hard with the tears running down my cheeks!

Nevertheless, here it is, based on the 2008 Minnesota tax tables.

The family in Mindeman's post with an adjusted taxable income of $200,000 might normally pay $14,145 in state income tax. To render a $10,000 increase for this family, Caesar would have to increase the rate for the current top marginal tax bracket from 7.85% to 32.88%!

This would never happen even if Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Larry Pogemiller handed out crack before every legislative session between now and the end of May.

Or let's say the family is making twice the threshold Mindeman mentions, and the evil state has added a new top bracket to steal their wealth, starting at income above $250,000. That would mean the new fourth tier would have to jump from 7.85% to 14.5% in order to raise an extra $10,000. (We won't even take into account that state taxes are deductible on federal income tax returns, so the effective cost to the high-income tax payer remains about 1/3rd less than $10,000.)

While it's not apparent, even in this economy, where to find a contractor who can do a home addition for $10,000, it's rather obvious who has not done the math.

There's yet more teeth gnashing in the post, but we've heard it before. The invitation to check his math, though, is new.

[By the way, a real bill that proposes to add a fourth tax bracket, just introduced by Sen. Ann Rest, would introduce an 8.5% top rate in 2010. For our family with the $400,000 income, that's a tax increase of about $1,000, unless they decide to move to South Dakota.]

I spent my first morning back in town speaking to a wealthy, and by appearances, mostly retired businessman's group. (About a quarter of the usual attendees live in other states during the winter.)

The topic was "Building a Post-Ponzi Nation," and I was not kind to a nation that has expended much of its best thinkers on devising exotic financial products and tax-evasion strategies instead of solving the very real limits of finite resources on an planet with exploding population.

My host once chaired the state Republican party and now was regarded the token liberal of the group. The gentleman seated on the other side of me happens to volunteer in the same homeless shelter where I'm headed this morning.They must have picked my seat with some care.

I got more nods than I expected, but I never got into the details of the "raise taxes on the wealthy" part of my talk. We have to get beyond ideology on either side to solve these problems, I said.

One acquaintance came up to me afterward and said, "You've got to stop calling yourself a 'progressive.'"

"Why's that?"

"Because you said some things I actually agree with."

I'm not sure that indicates a groundswell. There were also some folded arms, and some surely embraced the Norquistian philosophy — lower taxes, deregulate, privatize and cut social spending — that I criticized. But here were about 30 men, some in their 80s, getting together weekly to challenge their thinking.

I was going to post this as a response to Jeff Dege's comment on my earlier reaction to Craig Westover's "The problem with progressives," but it was starting to edge into full post territory, so it's here instead.

"A “progressive” is someone who acts on the belief that life can be improved."

No. A progressive is someone who believes that people can be
improved. That the only reason that we don't live in a utopian society
is that we haven't yet remade man in the right way.

The progressives collectivist dreams of how society is organized
have always faltered on the discord between how they believe people
should interact and how they always have interacted.

And they always will.

To quote Lileks:

"The other day I was talking with a Democrat friend about the
election. She'd remarked, with equal amounts of sarcasm and
good-natured ribbing, that the GOP had two years to build utopia. I
thought about that later while walking Jasper around the block, and
thought, no; they're not about building utopia. Personally, I'm
interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the
more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are
to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process."

See, that's the trouble with libertarians. They pretend to get the irony employed by us self-appointed elites and then turn around and accuse us of being humorless executioners behind our backs.

However, since we lost Mussolini as our glorious leader, the progressive record on public executions has been rather slim. (And you really can't count Hillary Clinton dropping the hammer on Vince Foster.) We really lack the experience to carry out that aspect of our plan for total world domination.

Jeff may be right, that as a progressive I believe life can be improved is by helping people improve. Otherwise, I'd be mostly limited to planting trees, pulling plastic bags out of ponds and eating three balanced meals a day.

Believing — and acting on the belief— that people can improve is still not the same thing as thinking I can perfect humanity or that government should enforce all manner of human relations. But Jeff and Lileks and Westover won't grant me any moderation or incremental progress. Once I start believing that society is better off if it sets goals to reduce poverty or pollution, for example, it's only a matter of time before I'm driving the black van that hauls off Family Lileks to Twins Stadium for a little publicly funded entertainment.

I guess if you see the world in absolutes, it's hard not to believe people who talk about "progress" are really trying to trick you into the oven if you dare want to bake your own cookies.

Though personal and political change is one premise of this blog, one only needs to read Jonah Goldberg and Craig Westover to see how deluded I am about humanity. And I am not just talking about their arguments.

Still, no one has even asked me to help put them in Guantanamo or Camp Wellstone Two. Some "collective!"

No, instead of worrying about everyone having the same leg kick in the May Day parade, the progressives I know are concerned about all kids getting educated, courts that work fairly and efficiently, good jobs, good government, and maybe once every four years, bringing the Republican National Convention to a complete, anarchic standstill.

Compared to doing that good work every day, I can't imagine wanting to live in a heaven on earth. Progressives like having something to look forward to.

Oh, my. It’s always a treat to have Craig Westover tell me what I think and stand for as a progressive.

No matter what provokes him or how widely he wanders to gather his
wooly proof points, he always gets around to the same rant:
Progressives aggressively impose their values on others, using the
police power of the state to extort from the hard-working class the
costs of providing extensive and unearned benefits to every slacker,
transit rider, unwed mother and drug addict in creation.

His latest (“The problem with progressives”)
might be called a straw man argument, provided one could see past all
the mud. In it, he manages to herd Growth & Justice, Mussolini and
stalwart Minnesota governors Harold Stassen, Elmer Anderson, Al Quie
and Arne Carlson — some of the leaders being honored by the G&J-sponsored Sept. 3rd
event, Celebrating Minnesota’s Progressive Republican Tradition — into a
single, muddled group of apostates.

The notion that
we are all progressives now — or, if not, we should be — is a dangerous
challenge to constitutionally limited government.

Well, that’s Westover’s
notion, which he proceeds to pummel into incoherence. Our event has a
less sweeping point to make — that a progressive orientation toward
governing is an admirable Minnesota political trait historically
exemplified in both parties. It has played a significant role in making
our state a model for how to achieve honest elections, effective
government, a vigorous, community-engaged private sector and relative
economic prosperity.

Minnesota’s progressive tradition is something worth recognizing and
celebrating at a time when the political spotlight is on us during the
Republican National Convention — and when our standing as a national
role model is coming into question.

In fact, progress is a core American value, and progressives represent the optimism and assertiveness of our founding fathers.

A “progressive” is someone who acts on the belief that life can be
improved. Progress, whether enjoyed by individuals, businesses,
communities or nations, is achieved through change that benefits
increasing numbers of our fellows. For example, Harold Stassen’s reform
of civil service that cleaned up serious corruption in state
employment; Al Quie’s ongoing quest to assure the quality of our
judiciary; Arne Carlson’s fiscal discipline coupled with visionary
planning and wise investment.

Progressives don’t believe mankind is perfectible, the market is
evil, the government is infallible or taxes are mother’s milk. We do
believe the world for our children — and other people's children — can
be made better than the one we ourselves enjoyed.

To Westover, though, we're totalitarians.

“Progressivism is politics as religion” that strives to aggressively
impose values on society. "’Growth’ and ‘justice’ are both desirable,”
he lectures, “and the progressive believes this makes them compatible
irrespective of the laws of economics.”

Thinking about how to treat others — with justice — ought to
engage our moral sense, but that does not mean government must dedicate
itself to erasing all differences among people or businesses. Nor that
business must tiptoe through every transaction lest it give offense or
be accused of exploitation.

Private interests and governments both have the capacity to improve
life. Yes, there are ideologues at the extremes who think the world
would run better if one or the other were more fully in charge, but
that does not represent the Growth & Justice position. Nor does it
accurately reflect the mainstream Minnesota view of a balance between
limited government and unlimited free markets.

Westover also conflates progressive politics with progressive
taxation. A progressive tax strives to achieve proportionality in the
overall tax system by taxing income at a higher rate as income
increases. A progressive tax is based on a model of justice and
fairness — that people who earn less should not pay a higher proportion
of their income for public services than people who earn the most, as
is the case today in Minnesota.

There's plenty of room for discussion on this point, but Westover
dismisses it as “moral argument, dividing the world into the
self-sacrificing good and the selfishly individual.”

It is difficult to know, however, who is on which side in Westover World, considering Westover himself recently wrote:
"Taxes as charity rob the giver of the virtue of the freely given gift
and the responsibility of judging a recipient worthy of the gift."

No moral argument going on there, surely.

In Westover’s immutable universe, no one who favors progress —
Republican, Democrat or Lutheran — can retain claim to their own core
principles. We hope — hoping is still allowed, isn't it? — Celebrating
Minnesota’s Progressive Republican Tradition will remind people of all
parties that it wasn’t always so.

[Note: This was cross-posted from Growth & Justice blog, where I write as a communication fellow for Growth & Justice.]

I'm glad Mitch Berg is biking to work. Truly. It's good for him, good for the earth and may even inspire others to give it a go.

It's also good for laughs.

I was sitting at a traffic light at the beginning of the longest,
ugliest leg of the climb, in my sweatshirt and windbreaker pants. A
twenty-something pulls up next to me in full spandex biker regalia,
with a “Obama” sticker on the side of his backpack.

Game on.

Now, the guy’s a real, genuine biker, with legs like tree trunks -
kind of like mine were 20 years ago, when I was biking constantly.

As we jumped off from the light, I got behind him and followed him
up the hill. He started pouring it on; I kept on going, staying about
four feet behind his back tire…

…and BOOM - we were up the hill! Done! Blammo! Just like that! Barely breathing hard!

I stayed in his slipstream for probably two miles, pacing him pretty
nicely. Now, for all I know he had mononucleosis and felt
half-past-dead and that was the only reason I could keep it close; I
am, after all, 45.

Still, that long, ugly hill practically vanished.

So my conclusion; without testosterone, humankind would still be sitting in caves gnawing on grass seeds.

For two miles he drafts off another biker hauling a backpack and then credits his own manly effort. I think I feel a metaphor coming on, but it's already been composed.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to
solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice:
Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and
aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher
probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of
the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic,
belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be
reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut
as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the
ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the
collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people
within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the
forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase, "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public," he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

_______

* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)

Chris Hedges quotes the president of Chicago Theological Seminary — "Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back." — in his essay, The Left Has Lost Its Way. He argues that the left has lost its sway by failing to hold fast to core issues. Let politicians compromise, he says.

Political and social change, as the radical Christian right and the
array of corporate-funded neocon think tanks have demonstrated, are
created by the building of movements. This is a lesson American
progressives have forgotten. The object of a movement is not to achieve
political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize
citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and
parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through
support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing
those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a
former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us.

[...]

The failure of the left is the failure of well-meaning people who kept
compromising and compromising in the name of effectiveness and a few
scraps of influence until they had neither. The condemnations
progressives utter—about the abuse of working men and women, the
rapacious cannibalization of the country by an unchecked arms industry,
our disastrous foreign wars, and the collapse of basic services from
education to welfare—are not backed by action. The left has been
transformed into anguished apologists for corporate greed. They have
become hypocrites.

There's more. Hedges says, rightly, "The rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no
longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations, is as much
a part of the Democratic agenda as the Republican agenda." The working class has a right to be bitter with liberal elites.

The struggle now for progressives is to find their nerve, he says.

Looking back across the grim 8-year legacy of the Naderite Rebellion and the Kerry Collapse, it's tempting to go for the electoral win, no matter what "our" candidate represents. The consequences of more Bushism are terrible to contemplate. But it wasn't just the GOP that brought us the prospect of broader economic collapse, perpetual war and a widening class divide, was it?

This impulse welled up after spending far more time on John McCain's
mouth than any non-member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry
should, and then reading George Will's "Liberals speak of generosity; conservatives actually have it."

"The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than
conservatives," he intones, sounding not very surprised at all, while the headline writer follows right along.

Will picked this week to write about a book published 16 months ago that forwards a premise that
liberals give financial lip service to their social values. You've probably heard this already, in a far less affected manner than Will manages:

While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than
governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a
retrograde phenomenon — a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare
state, and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by
increasing taxes.

In other words, we substitute other people's taxes for our personal charity.

You'd think in honor of tax time Will would at least congratulate us Blue Staters for taking smaller deductions, thereby paying more to the government. Isn't that living your values?

Okay, seriously. My annoyance with Will's piece starts with how he slants the evidence even further to the right than what's in Arthur C. Brooks's Who
Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. Will says:

Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those
of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on
average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed
household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

Will notes the importance of religion as an underpinning of
conservative values, but he neglects to mention that religious giving
accounts for most of this disparity.

Brooks found religious donors gave about 3.5 times the amount secular donors did — on average $2,210 versus $642 — and most of that giving went to religious causes. That tracks with a recent report from the
Minnesota Council on Foundations, which says individual religious giving
in the state dwarfs all other categories at about
60% of charitable dollars.

But according to a review in Philanthropy,
when Brooks measured only giving to non-religious causes, the
difference between religious and secular givers fell to $88. He
also found that religious conservatives gave slightly more than
religious liberals, while secular liberals were more generous than
their conservative counterparts.

I could further question the size and source of any giving gap, but what really got me was the divisive set up. Like asking "why do conservatives kill their kids?" Will's formulation of the research is presented in a way that incites argument rather than invites exploration by the "accused."

Instead, what if we approached Brooks's book in a spirit of discovery? What sorts of questions might we ask? And what might we learn about ourselves that would actually be useful?

For example:

Am I more generous than other Americans? If not, is that something I want to change?

Why do I give? To solve social ills or make myself feel good?

Do my giving patterns show ideological or class biases? Does that matter?

Is it better to give to the poor than to the arts or environment? How do I make those choices?

Do my political opinions make it hard for me to see the actual social value in religious giving and faith-based initiatives? Do others discount the value of public investment for similar reasons?

If we can agree on desired outcomes from fulfilling social needs, will it be easier for the community to agree on a variety of funding methods?

When readers are introduced to issues in a way that accentuates existing political notions — such as government wastes my money or wealth and morality are incompatible — it's very difficult to reach any kind of understanding, either of the other side's beliefs or the deeper complexities of the problem.

This article about fundamentalism expresses in another way the constructive potential of the tension between liberal and conservative thought.

Fundamentalism's conservative impulse wants
stability in societies. Liberal impulses serve to give us not stability but civility: humanity. They do this
by expanding the definitions of our inherited territorial categories.
The essential job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our
understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of
virtually all liberal advances.

[...]

When
liberal visions work, it's because they have kept one foot solidly in
our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the
margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our”
territory.

When liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve
just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our
liberal needs.

The problem, of course, is that this notion of balance fits better with liberalism. The fundamentalists are less likely to budge.